A woman recalled being so blinded by love as a teenager that it took her three months to realize her boyfriend only had one leg.
“If you ever thought that you were blissfully unaware, let me tell you about the time I dated a guy for three months before finding out he didn’t have a leg,” TikTok user @postpartumpsycho kicked off a viral video that has attracted 2.1 million views since it was posted last month.
“I was 17. Met this boy at the rodeo. I saw him across the way, and I said, ‘That is a tall, tall gorgeous man, and I need to have him.’ So we exchanged numbers. By three weeks later, we were in love.”
The TikToker said she and her 6-foot-6 boyfriend, whose name she did not disclose, “were inseparable. We saw each other, like, every day. We spent every waking moment together.”
There were some red flags, she admitted. She reported he wore long pants to outdoor summer events, limped when he walked and stopped her from coming to his basketball games.
Then one day, she noticed something was off when she looked at a photo of the two of them together.
“The more I stared at it, the more I was like, ‘I think I’m being bamboozled,'” she recalled.
“So I took this picture to my friends, and I said, ‘Guys, I think my boyfriend might only have one leg.'”
She said her friends were puzzled by the accusation and encouraged her to get answers from her beau.
He eventually confessed a few weeks later, she said.
“He’s like, ‘I have Polio,'” she claimed. “I was like, listen, I suspected this for a couple of weeks now, and you made it really weird by not telling me.”
Polio, a highly contagious virus, is very rare, thanks to the CDC-approved polio vaccine. An unvaccinated Rockland County, New York, resident infected last summer marked the first polio case recorded in the US since 2013, officials said.
The disease often enters the body via contaminated water, and it can cause paralysis or death.
The TikToker said her boyfriend didn’t feel the need to share his condition since she met him without knowing about it. He said he “ran with it.”
“I was like, I guess, but, like, three months? You hid it for three months? I’m that dumb and unaware,” she admitted.
She revealed the couple dated for six more months, adding, “We were very in love, and then I went to college and ruined it.”
The three-minute story time resonated with many viewers, inspiring some to share their relationship challenges.
